Can you migrate a web app available via '/' to a proxied sub-URI without modifying the web app?

[Peter Booth]

There's "can you?" and there's "should you?" My attitude is that life is short, so I want to avoid building any opportunities to break.

Imagine that you deploy your N web apps. There can be a real value in being able to access the web app directly when debugging, and avoiding the web server layer. (for example, if your web server is also a caching reverse proxy) That means that your web app emits relative links that are valid in the context of the app. Best of all is if they also work on web server without URL rewriting.

What you're asking for is unreliably possible, but a bad idea. Imagine that you want to deploy a dev, QA, uat and demo version of the site - what urls would theee be?

Peter

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 9, 2017, at 8:37 AM, Francis Daly <francis at daoine.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, May 08, 2017 at 06:17:02PM -0500, deoren wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> 
>> I'm still
>> not completely clear on whether this is supported.
> 
> nginx does the nginx side as much as it can. Whether it all works is
> almost entirely down to the web app.
> 
> You cannot reliably reverse-proxy an arbitrary web app to a different
> place in the url hierarchy than that at which it believes it is installed.
> 
> You can unreliably do it, if that is good enough for you.
> 
>> #2) I'd like to move the web application to
>> https://subdomain.example.com/sub-uri/ by setting up location block
>> like so (spacing condensed for display purposes):
>> 
>>    location /flask-demo {
>>        root /var/www/passenger-python-flask-demo;
>>        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
>>        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
>>        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
>>        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000/;
>>    }
>> 
>> The trailing slash was added in an attempt to map
>> /flask-demo/SOMETHING to /SOMETHING in the application's point of
>> view.
> 
> Just as a small point -- it is usually worth making sure that the numbers
> of / characters at the end of the "proxy_pass" argument and at the end
> of the "location" prefix value, are the same.
> 
>> That works well for a test web app where everything is contained in
>> a single file, but when the static assets are referenced by the HTML
>> output the user's browser attempts to pull static content from '/'
>> instead of '/flask-demo/'.
> 
> I would suggest that the HTML output of the web app is wrong.
> 
> It should never link to /static/styles.css, if it wants to be
> reverse-proxied.
> 
> It should link to static/styles.css or to ../static/styles.css or to
> ../../static/styles.css or to whatever value is appropriate relative to
> the current resource.
> 
> If the web app did that, then reverse-proxying would probably Just Work.
> 
> "Not wanting to be reverse-proxied" is a valid choice for a web app. And
> you can choose not to use ones that make that choice.
> 
>> I'm hoping there is a way to isolate each web application based on
>> the initial location block match, thereby catching follow-up
>> requests for static resources related to the first request and
>> prepend the sub-URI.
> 
> In http, every request is independent of every other request, unless
> you do something to try to tie them together (such as with a Cookie).
> 
> Stock nginx will receive a request for /static/styles.css, and will
> handle it according to its configuration.
> 
> If you want your nginx to receive a request for /static/styles.css, and
> to do some processing based on the Referer: header or based on a Cookie:
> header or something else, in order that the final processed request will
> be /flask-demo/static/styles.css, then you will probably have to write
> some code in one of the embedded languages in nginx.conf.
> 
> I'm not aware of code like that existing.
> 
>> I assume the answer is "no, this is not supported", but I wanted to
> 
> If you write the code, you can make it work (unreliably) for you.
> 
> It cannot work in stock nginx just using nginx.conf normal directives.
> 
>> ask just to make sure I'm not overlooking something. Francis Daly's
>> remarks on the "URL-Rewriting not working" thread that I've quoted
>> from below seems to suggest it might be possible, but probably isn't
>> worth the headache:
> 
> Your outline above is that nginx should not do the translation in the
> html sent to the client, but that nginx should interpret the following
> requests based on something not directly specified in the request line.
> 
> That is possibly harder than doing the translation in the html.
> 
>>> That is, if you want the back-end / to correspond to
>>> the front-end /x/, then if the back-end ever links to
>>> something like /a, you will need that to become
>>> translated to /x/a before it leaves the front-end. In
>>> general, the front-end cannot do that translation.
> 
> You can try to get the front-end to do that translation; it will also
> be unreliable and probably inefficient.
> 
> Basically, any text that the client might interpret as a url that starts
> with http:// or https:// or / would potentially have to be modified. And
> possibly some other text as well, depending on the exact contents.
> 
>>> So you may find it easier to configure the back-end to
>>> be (or to act as if it is) installed below /x/ directly.
> 
> That is still true.
> 
> If you won't do that, and if you have two web apps that each want to
> be at /, you may be better off having two server{} blocks in nginx with
> different server_name values.
> 
>> I found the 'proxy_redirect' directive, but it doesn't appear to do
>> what I'm looking for.
> 
> proxy_redirect deals with http headers, not with the body content.
> 
>> I've used nginx for years, but only in very basic configurations.
>> This is something new to me and I'm struggling to wrap my head
>> around it. Thank you for reading this and any advice you can offer.
> 
> It's a http and url thing, rather than an nginx thing.
> 
> Good luck with it,
> 
>    f
> -- 
> Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org
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